


Crossroads Part I: Some Halloween Shit

by Zooheaded



Series: Crossroads [1]
Category: True Detective
Genre: AU, Case Fic, Gore, Graphic Violence, Horror, M/M, Occult, Paranormal, Some Stephen King shit, eventual slash, mostly canon compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5106761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zooheaded/pseuds/Zooheaded
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>It was a Tuesday evening on January the third, just past eight o'clock, when the call that would irreversibly alter Marty's path through this life patched in over the crackling police issue car radio. The moon was only half risen, slipping in between the clouds and shining a cool light, bright, and white as dead bleached bone down upon the chilled, dew moistened streets. It was just past eight, Marty remembers, because eight was when the rerun of the college basketball game aired and he was pissed he was out looking for some woman murdering asshole instead of back in his cozy apartment with a beer in his hand.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In twenty four minutes, he would no longer care. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossroads Part I: Some Halloween Shit

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, this is gonna be a multi-part, multi-chapter work that somewhat follows the True Detective story but with a significant occult and paranormal leaning. I'm sure I'm not the first person who almost expected some Cthulu shit to spill out of that void Rust sees in the finale. For those who were disappointed by the lack of a paranormal ending, allow me to make it up to you. I'm gonna fill this chock full of urban legend, folklore and Myth and eventually some porn because that's my process. This first chapter shall set the stage and the tone, and I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Somewhat for the True Detective Halloween challenge on tumblr, but for a prompt I never submitted, but I'm sure it might, in time, fill some of those unanswered prompts.

 

>   
>  _Thirteen tiger teeth in my talisman_  
>  _St. John the Conqueror and a black cat bone_  
>  _I been seen walkin' with the guardians_  
>  _Now I’m in the alley and I’m all alone_  
>  _I can't run, can't hide from destiny_  
>  _Knew this day was callin' nearly all of my life_  
>  _Been done ain't the only boy from Tennessee_  
>  _To carve his name in cypress with a jawbone knife_
> 
> _Meet me in the alleyway_  
>  _minute to midnight Don't be late_  
>  _meet me in the alleyway_  
>  _Better come runnin' the spirits won't wait_

> — _Meet Me in the Alleyway_ , Steve Earle

 

 

 _Maybe it was better having things this way_ , Marty would say to himself on the occasional off day. It was going on two years now since he'd gone and royally fucked himself over, lost his wife, his house, the respect of his kids, and basically made a wreck of his entire fucking existence, because he couldn't keep his hands out of the cookie jar, and no amount of pleading, begging and AA meetings would ever get Maggie to take him back. He fucked up, he knew that, but fuck it right? He saw his girls every other weekend and in the meantime he could fuck whoever he came across without the stress of hiding it anymore.

Working for the state, especially lead detective in the Criminal Investigations Division for homicide, was the kind of work that required a significant degree of decompression to make it through the day, but Marty's partner, the green eyed, mud haired Richard Williams, was the kind of guy who was always good for a laugh. A casually thrown observation about the “Miss America off the stage and turning trick” style of a DB's hair, or the subtle commentary of blood spattered curtains looking like “an old lady's stretched out britches” or “pancake titties” could have Marty go from grim faced to stitches laughing fit to piss inside of five seconds flat. It wasn't exactly professional, but it did help keep their sanity. A valuable commodity in short supply at the site of a gruesome murder. It made the snapshots of debauchery they had to wade through on a daily basis bearable.

Rich liked to go out after work for a drink with the boys, he talked sports, country music, politics, religion, all that regular-type shit. Rich respected authority and he was fucking funny on top of it. A good egg, as far as Marty was concerned. They got along great for the most part, though any day Rich didn't bring up his torn ACL college injury that kept him out of big league football was a good one in Marty's eyes.

Rich had really come through for Marty when Maggie had decided to throw him out on his ass. He'd let Marty crash at his apartment instead of in some shitty motel. Pulled a laugh out of him when Marty'd been just barely skirting the edge of tears, and offered up a sympathetic ear. The scene Marty had made at the hospital where Mags'd been working her night shift had gotten him arrested. He'd narrowly avoided a suspension, and that had just about dealt the death blow to any chance he'd had on fixing things with her. Rich had bailed him out that night. Had told him he was better off letting it go, getting visitation rights with his daughters, getting a fucking move on with his life _now_ before he hit the big four-oh, cause after _that_ , well... it was fuck all for sure after that.

 _Better off_ , Rich had said, and most days, Marty believed it.

He was living the bachelor life with the assured continuance of his genes in the form of two perfect little girls with whom he could be a backseat father for, one weekend at a time, and he fuckin' liked it that way. Wasn't that the dream of every man? Have the kids and family and all the sex he could ask for without the nagging wife? Here Marty was, livin' the fucking _dream_ , man. Not a care in the world. Or at least, that's what he told himself when he skipped the booze meetings and opted for that special brand of therapy one could only find in the bottom of a green or brown glassed bottle.

Those sad, lonely evenings of regret were becoming fewer and farther between however, and things were good now. Fucking great, even. Everything was going silky smooth, and that's what Marty continued to feed himself, right up until the moment reality folded in on itself and broke around him, rushing headlong down the shitter in a slurry of teeth and blood and bone.

 

 

It was a Tuesday evening on January the third, just past eight o'clock, when the call that would irreversibly alter Marty's path through this life patched in over the crackling police issue car radio. The moon was only half risen, slipping in between the clouds and shining a cool light, bright, and white as dead bleached bone down upon the chilled, dew moistened streets. It was just past eight, Marty remembers, because eight was when the rerun of the college basketball game aired and he was pissed he was out looking for some woman murdering asshole instead of back in his cozy apartment with a beer in his hand.

In twenty four minutes, he would no longer care.

“I23?” the radio came to life and a familiar feminine voice called out into the swirling empty space of the chevy interior. Marty cursed and fumbled with the radio while Rich gave him a knowing, shit eating grin. _Asshole_.

God damn, _Kelly_. He'd fucked her some two months ago, and all he could think of when she brought calls in was the annoying braying sound her throat had made when she'd accidentally gotten some of her hair caught under his elbow when they'd been going at it. She'd sounded like a goddamn goat that had been half killed with an axe and left to bleed out in a ditch. Needless to say, his dick wilted faster than a spring daisy in a Hellfire noonday sun.

Marty fairly sighed when he jammed his thumb up against the receiver button, “This is I23. What've you got?”

“217 with Dale Carrel at 427 Oaks Road, Abbeville.” Kelly said sharply.

Marty and Rich exchange glances.

“That's our KA, fucking assault with intent- I23 dispatch, we're going in. Over.”

“Roger that I23. Alerting all nearby units.”

They'd been hunting down some steady leads on Terry Banet, their main suspect in the brutal murder of a prost down in a frequented biker bar in south Abbeville. It didn't take them long to learn that Terry's best pal was some little shitstain named Dale Carrel, that went by the moniker of 'Diller' like some fucked up slang for armadillo or some shit. That didn't matter, but what _did_ matter was that Diller might be the only guy who could point them in the direction of Banet.

It didn't take Rich and Marty ten minutes to make the drive to Oak Rd, but it might as well have been a hundred years. If Diller was inside busting somebody up, or getting his ass handed to him and wound up dead they were as good as fucked, they wouldn't never find Terry Banet otherwise.

They pulled into the driveway for 427, and it was a nicer place than Marty expected, nice for project housing anyway. It was a little beige ranch house with brick foundation, bushes, window boxes and everything. The whole nine yards. A partially restored Trans Am sat parked further up in the driveway, half obscured by a sheet. There were no other vehicles there that might've indicated a visitor, or that anybody was even home. The lights were off in the house and when Marty looked up either end of the street it was dead silent.

“Maybe he was banging his old lady and some neighbor thought it was assault?” Rich murmured, hand resting firmly on the edge of his open car door.

“Maybe.” Marty said, then thumbs the safety off his gun, “but maybe not.”

Rich followed Marty's lead, clicking off the safety of his own weapon, and closed the car door with his hip.

Marty yanks open the flimsy screen door and raises his hand, the unspoken _State police, open up_ , sitting just on the edge of his tongue, when he notices that the inner wooden door is ajar and leaning just slightly to the side like something had come and tried to cave it in. Upon the door were several large scratch marks, like a large dog had been clawing at it, begging to be let in. _A fucking 217 alright, Jesus Christ, but where is he?_

“State Police!” Marty calls, but with a little less volume then he'd intended, some unknown feeling of dread has come over him. Sweat beads up on his brow and his heart begins to pound in his chest. He thinks again of his little Lafayette apartment, his chair, the beer, the game, and wills this whole fucking thing to be easy. The door was open just enough to allow legal entry, and Marty went in, gun drawn, Rich just behind him.

Moonlight slanted in from the wide picture window like a knife sunk hilt deep into the room, and illuminates a sea of feathers drifting in mid air like an ethereal indoor snow. Slashed pillows lay open and limp on the floor like victims of another kind, and furniture was knocked back, lamps shattered in pieces on the ground. The place looked like it had been hit by a goddamn hurricane.

Marty hears Rich's mumbled “The fuck...” just behind him as he advances through the room, shoulders held broad as he does sweeping checks of all the corners. In the back of the house, a bedroom maybe, a light is on, and from the lit room, sounds could be heard, muffled and wet sounding, like soggy cardboard being torn up.

The dread Marty feels intensifies, and he suddenly wishes he were somewhere else, anywhere else but here- Rich moves in close behind him and checks the dark bathroom, coming up empty. They move together in tandem, flanking the half open door. When Rich toes the door open with his foot, pistol aimed at the sliver of light, Marty will wish he hadn't, and he'll keep on wishing for many months to come.

At first he can't process what he's seeing, the room sits like a still snapshot in his eyes as a blur of red with a sharp smear of brown in the center. His eyes lock first with that of a dead man, their KA Diller staring up at him, frozen and glassy eyed with a pool of blood spreading out around him, his throat ripped wide by a- and Marty's eyes cut up, as though the most obvious thing in the entire fucking room was so terrible, so unbelievable, that the only way he could survive the mere sight of it was to slide it on over to second fiddle.

“Oh my god-” Rich says next to him and at that, the thing looks up, almost startled, yellow eyes gleaming. _A big fucking dog_ , Marty thinks, but it ain't like any dog he's ever seen, it was _big_ , bigger than a Rottweiler or a German Shepherd or even a Great Dane, it was the biggest fucking dog he'd ever laid eyes on and the more he looked at it, the more he realized that it couldn't have been a dog, it was a _wolf_. It had to be, but _Jesus Christ it was the size of a fucking pony-_

At the sight of them, the great wolf's lips pulled back in a snarl, revealing garish pink gums and a thousand razor sharp teeth bathed in blood. A howl rose from the dark bowels of the thing's throat and bayed out like clean silver, sending a blade of pure terror straight into Marty's gut. Reflexively, he staggers back.

The snarls it emitted, the snarls sounded so much like human voices, _asking, asking-_

Beside him Rich screamed the scream of a man half mad and opened fire. A bullet strikes the wolf in the shoulder in a burst of blood and fur finer than rabbit's. The thing roared and whined and rose up on its hind legs and stood before them, then moved forward with a blurred kind of speed and fell upon Rich like a shroud. Marty sees teeth close around his partner's neck and clamp down, the scream cutting off in a wet, gurgled choke, his throat severed so deep he's nearly beheaded and blood pours warm and fresh into the room as the wolf bites again and again and again, and that's a career killing injury for sure, never gonna play football now huh Rich, that's for damn sure, _oh god, oh Christ-_

It was like a horror movie, like any one of a thousand late night films he'd stayed up and sat through, brought to life in front of him, but all he could think of as he shambled backwards like a stiff corpse, his throat frozen, his gun dropped from nerveless fingers, was what his grandmother had always told him when he'd gotten in trouble:

_If you're bad Marty, the Loup Garou will get you._

And Marty's been bad, he knows, and he runs for the door, terror on his heels.

He escapes outside into the open air, the world lit like blue silver around him, and he wrenches the driver side door of the chevy open and fumbles the key into the ignition. The car roars to life and Marty peels holy Hell out of the driveway, not caring about pedestrians, not caring about the speed limit, not giving a single fuck for Diller, not even caring about his own partner whom he'd left bleeding out on the carpet in the jaws of a monster.

He doesn't pull his foot from the gas pedal until he's near hit sixty, then drives for fifteen minutes or more until he reaches the friendly lights of a gas station. In one of the empty parking spaces he kills the engine and sits there, numb and trembling until childlike tears rise up and overwhelm him.

 


End file.
